


Like People Who Talk

by MarinaTheBloody



Category: Daria (Cartoon)
Genre: F/M, Post Series, Unresolved resolved tension, When did they get mature enough to talk to eachother?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-15
Updated: 2017-08-15
Packaged: 2018-12-15 22:00:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,715
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11815044
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MarinaTheBloody/pseuds/MarinaTheBloody
Summary: Daria and Trent meet up for coffee while Daria's visiting Jane during the summer before her Junior year of college. They decide it's finally time to have an honest conversation with each other but are both confused as to what that means.





	Like People Who Talk

“So how real do you want this real talk to be?” Trent was leaning back in a metal chair outside of the cafe in a place neither of them lived, her visiting Jane, him coming through on tour.

“What do you mean?” Daria sat, rigidly at first, perched on the edge of her chair, barely shielded from the sun by the umbrella, until she relaxed in her seat as the first sip of coffee made its way through her veins.

“Do you want total brutal honesty or do you want to sit here making wry remarks and joking and not talking about anything. Or do you want a mix of the two?” He was looking at her like he always looked at her, a mix of awe, love, and sadness _or was it pity_? She thought, with a bitter grimace.

“Can we do a mix?”

“You gotta tell me what that mix is then, I’m better at brutal.” There was a beat. “That would be a good lyric.” He was twiddling an e-cig between his hands like a drumstick. Daria sighed.

“Let’s go with full honesty then.” _When had he quit smoking?_

“Do you still feel the same about me?”

“Do you?” Daria never liked making the first move, with one notable exception.

“Yeah. I do.”

“I do too. I thought I didn’t for a while, hoped I didn’t I guess, but yeah. I do.” She was studying the cardboard coffee cup with such intensity she thought it might catch fire.

“What changed?”

“I was seeing this guy, and then things got crazy with school and I forgot anything but what I was doing. Then I got a break.” She shrugged. They had never talked about it in person, not really, just allusions to it. The shared knowledge of a shared crush that probably wouldn’t work. Until she had exploded at him seven months earlier, demanding an answer, demanding closure. He told her she deserved it, that he felt the same but they shouldn’t. That he was older than her, that she was 18, now 19, that he had married Monique _managed to go the entire conversation without mentioning her._ And now here they were. Sitting outside a coffee shop in the middle of nowhere, talking, like people who talk to each other.

“I’ve gone over this a million times, but I can’t seem to find a scenario where you don’t get the short end of the stick.” _Since when is Trent someone who thinks about other people, about me_ , Daria thought, stunned.

“Yeah,” she squeaked. _Oh, nothing has changed. I’m still the kid. He’s still married. But he feels the same._

They sat in silence. Each staring at their coffee. He was drumming on the table, she was twisting her cup against the plastic lid.

“I like that I know you well enough to know what you do with your hands when there is something you want to say but don’t know how.” He was looking at her with that face, sadness and love. She blushed. “It’s one of the things I love about you.”  
Her world stopped. Paused. Stuttered. He had used the word love about her. Her eyes got wide and she almost laughed.

“This is weird. Right? There isn’t really a guidebook on how to do this.”

“No.”

They talked about the same things they always talked about. Sick Sad World, music, Trent had started getting into history on tour, something to read to mine for new lyrics, Daria was starting her thesis and had gotten her first essay published, an allegory between her life and Joan of Arc. He told her that there was not a thing she put to paper that wasn’t worthy of publishing and she turned bright red and said, “Well why can’t I seem to talk, then?” It was easy, like it had always been, talking to Trent felt like coming home.

“Things might have been different if you had told me after this week. After the week I’ve had. I might not be married when I get home.” He said, looking somewhere over her shoulder.

“Oh. Uhm. I’m sorry?”

“A drunken mistake was made, not by me, but yeah.” He looked down.

“I’m sorry.” They fell silent. Daria not sure how to respond, even though she wanted to cheer, Trent trying not to say anything else he shouldn’t.

“Janey was proud of me for how I handled this, with you.” He finally told her, looking at her sidelong.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah, usually when a beautiful, intelligent, hilarious girl tells me she likes me, my first instinct is to hold hands, talk about life, and burn the house down around us.”

“Oh.”

“But that wouldn’t be fair to you, you get that, right?”

“Yeah.”

There was another silence. Daria got it, really, she did. She was young. It felt different to have someone not do something because it was in her best interest. She was flattered and angry at once. She wanted to punch him and kiss him in the same breath. Instead, she tore at the cardboard sleeve of her coffee cup.

“I still want to be friends. I miss having you as my friend.” She blurted out, they hadn’t talked since she told him she had feelings for him and needed closure. It seemed the obvious choice, to be friends again. It wasn’t like they could go their whole lives without seeing each other again, they would always be in the same orbit.

  
“I’m glad you said that. I miss you. I really fucking miss you.” Just then, Daria’s coffee cup launched itself out of her hands and flew three feet away. She scrambled to grab it and then returned to her chair, trying to get back to the calculated “chill” posture she had been in.

  
“I see some things never change,” Trent laughed, coughed, laughed.

“Yeah, uhm...”

“So, what does this look like from here, what does us as friends look like?” He asked.

“I want to say exactly how it looked before, but 20% of our conversations were us openly flirting.” Fuck, where did that come from?

“You think?”

“I think. But let’s just go back to how it was,” she looked at her feet, “I miss my friend. What does this look like to you, ideally?”

“Ideally? I want to burn the house down.”

“Okay, ideally, that.”

“But realistically? Let’s do your thing, it’s the smarter choice.”

“Yeah.”

“Look, I could sit here and talk to you forever, but I need to get some sleep before the gig tonight and I should get to Jesse’s hotel room to make sure he’s asleep too. Can I give you a ride back to Jane’s?”

“Yeah, okay.”

The ride back was more comfortable than the ride there had been, Daria let her legs stretch out, let herself look at Trent instead of staring out of her window.

When they got back to Jane’s, Trent got out to say goodbye, who knew when they’d see each other again, Daria was leaving that afternoon, before the show.

They hugged. Longer than a hug. They held each other for dear life, like life preservers, each worried that the other would float away into the open ocean. His fingers drew lazy circles on her back, she was on her toes and had her head tucked into his neck. They stood like that for somewhere between 2 and 20 minutes, Jane, staring from the window, was no help with the timing when Daria questioned her later. They pulled back, their faces so close Daria saw Trent’s eyes so close together they looked like one cyclops eye. Their arms were still circled around each other, letting go now meaning letting go forever.

“It’s really hard not to kiss you right now.” Trent said. There was a ringing in Daria’s ears. Time stopped completely as she tried to hear that sentence on a loop. She stared at him and cocked what she hoped was a half smile with sad eyes.

“Yeah. It really is.” They went back into the hug and Trent kissed her on the cheek, like he did years ago at the pizza place, this was different through. This was a kissed that was meant for somewhere else.

  
“I missed you,” she mumbled into his shoulder. Trent nodded against her neck and they pulled away again, their faces somehow closer, two fingers space apart. He pressed his forehead against hers. She heard laughter from the window. She opened her eyes and looked at him. She was so close to his mouth, It would only take a nudge to be kissing. They pulled back slightly.

  
“Get out of here before I make a terrible decision.” Trent almost laughed as he said it, knowing what was about to happening, knowing neither of them would be able to leave until one of them had done something stupider than getting coffee together after seven months of radio silence.

  
Daria stood on the toes of her boots and closed the last two inches of space just as Trent had begun to lean down to meet her. Her arms wrapped around his neck and his around her waist, hands touching her sides he held her so tight. Their lips meet with the urgency and the care of people who had been in love for the last three years without so much as holding hands, aside from when she had held his during her first belly ring piercing. They parted after what seemed like hours.

“So, do you have a lighter on you?”

“Never leave home without it,” Trent laughed and fished his trademark white lighter out of his pocket.

“Ready to burn down the house?”

“As soon as you walked out of that door and into my car.”

“Goddamnit, but I love you.” She muttered, staring down at the boots she’d been wearing since high school. Trent kissed the top of her head.

  
“Well that works out. I love you, but I really do have to go crash with Jesse. I promise not to disappear. You don’t disappear either.”

  
Daria nodded, rooted to the sidewalk as she watched Trent get back into his new/used neon yellow car.

  
“Yeah, okay,” she said to herself as she watched him round the corner of Jane’s street, “Okay, yeah.”

**Author's Note:**

> I'm thinking of adding more chapters to this, let me know what you think!


End file.
